Hello (cruel) World

I’ve been having a lot of fun with NHibernate recently and, during my spare time, have a few pet projects that I like to work on to improve my skillset (especially because it looks like my company is going to give an ORM a test run in the not too distant future). Everyone has their opinion on whether or not a Repository with an ORM is a good thing or a bad thing, and I’m not going to rehash any such arguments, except to say the following: I needed to stop implementing the same old LoadSomethingById, UpdateSomething, SaveSomething, etc. methods for every single data type in my service layer. I found myself re-inventing the wheel, albeit with different naming conventions, over and over again While NHibernate does provide a layer of abstraction in and of itself, I was reluctant to couple a particular ORM to my solution (i.e. call _session.Load<SomeType>(id) directly from my controller/codebehind/whatever) So, as a learning exercise (like the world needed another one…) I

Disclosure: I recently received review copies of two books in Manning’s Ruby series. The first, and the subject of today’s review is The Well Grounded Rubyist by David A. Black. These days it feels as though one couldn’t throw a rock in a major metropolitan area without hitting a ruby developer. Worse still, each appears more enthused than the last. This enthusiasm is either infectious or annoying, depending on the individual, but as a .NET developer by day I’m admittedly intrigued to see what all the fuss is about. While I enjoy the .NET stack and will be using it professionally for the foreseeable future, it’s time to balance my skill set somewhat and Ruby (on Rails) may be just the tonic - hence my request to review this title. Expect some future Ruby/Rails/VIM related posts! I haven’t yet found a good reference explaining the different naming conventions employed by Manning in their series’ titles (let me know if one exists and I’ll post a li